How-to: Rebooting a Toyota Tacoma CV Axle

March 21, 2019.

If you own a Toyota Tacoma — and especially if you drive it off-road or with any kind of lift — you’re likely to have a CV axle boot crack or split at some point, flinging grease everywhere and making a royal mess.

I was lucky enough to have it happen on the first day of a two week trip to Anza-Borrego. Winning!

Once this happens, you essentially have three options:

1. Do nothing. This is the route a lot of people take, sometimes because they don’t even notice the problem. For me of course, it wasn’t an option.
2. Buy an entirely new CV axle and replace the one with the torn boot. This can be a reasonable option if you’re willing to install an aftermarket axle — they can be had with lifetime warranties from places like Napa. I wasn’t though — I want to go OEM (43430–04020) with a part like this, and that meant a new axle would run me on the order of $400-$500. Ouch.
3. Buy the parts to reboot your existing CV axle. At something around $50, this reboot kit is a more economical option — assuming you have the tools available to do the job.

It’s probably obvious from my descriptions that I decided to go with option 3. Having never rebooted a CV before, I figured this could be a good learning experience — and if worse came to worse, I could always fall back to another option in order to get the truck buttoned up for the next trip.

The first step — as usual — was to assemble all the necessary parts and tools to do the job. I nearly succeeded at this, but as seems to be the case more often than not, there was one issue I’d run into as I progressed through the project.

Parts

The parts were simple — Toyota makes a reboot kit ( 04438–04021) for these CV axles, and that kit has nearly everything you need: an inner boot, and outer boot, several boot clamps, some new snap rings, and the appropriate grease.

The one thing about this kit that I discovered is that the large inner boot clamp is different than the other three clamps included in the kit. It’s the earless variety, which meant that it required a different tool, and was much harder to install then the other three clamps. Ultimately, I found it much easier — and more secure — to order a Moog 3401 CV Boot Crimp Clamp Kit, which installed in the same fashion as the others and allowed me to get the job completed simply and easily (and have plenty of clamps to spare for the future)!

Tools

Besides parts, there were a couple new tools I had to buy for this project. In all honesty, they are probably tools I should have had in my kit already, but this was a good excuse to add them:

And then, there were tools that I already had around:

• 35mm socket — for the axle nut.
• Wire cutters — for cutting the old boots and clamps.
• Impact wrench (or large breaker bar) — for the axle nut.
• 14mm socket — to separate the lower ball joint (LBJ) from the spindle.
• Torque wrench — to re-torque the LBJ bolts, as well as axle nut.
• Some brake cleaner, to clean up the CV joints and prepare them for new grease.
• A bunch of shop towels to mop up all the axle grease.

Rebooting a Tacoma CV Axle

Parts and tools acquired, it was time to get started. The process is reasonably straight forward once you’ve done it once — or maybe even before you’ve done it once, depending on your comfort level — I was planning to do both axles, and had allotted a day to do it, just in case anything went south.

I got started — as one does — by removing the skid plate. I recommend admitting to yourself that it’s heavy and using a floor jack for this. Just don’t take a photo — then you can can tell everyone else you muscled it off with one hand while you loosened bolts with the other.

Next, get the front of the truck up on jack stands and remove the wheel, followed by the axle nut cover. This is my least favorite part of the process — it’s always harder to pry this cover off than I expect, and I always feel like I’m marring it up in the process. I’ve found that a narrow screwdriver and a traditional hammer (not a dead-blow or mallet) works best to pop it off.

With access to the axle nut, remove the cotter pin and capture washer so that you can pull out your uuga-ugga wrench — I recommend a Milwaukee Fuel Mid-Torque Impact Wrench, but you could also use a long breaker bar — to zip of the nut and release the CV axle from the hub.

Now it’s time to get the hub assembly out of the way in order to pull the CV out of the front differential. There are several ways to do this, but I’ve found that the easiest by far is to unbolt the four, 14mm LBJ bolts from the spindle, and then swing the spindle and hub out of the way, exposing the CV axle and giving it a path to exit the vehicle.

To separate the CV from the front differential, use a pry bar between the mating surfaces and give it a little tap — the CV will pop right out, and you can snake it out past your front suspension. Then — as best you can — clean up some of that grease that was keeping your suspension from rusting — and get the axle to a surface that will be easy to clean all the grease off of, because things are about to get messy!

The first step in the reboot process is to remove the small snap-ring that indexes the axle into the front diff. New snap rings are included in the reboot kit, so I found that it easiest to just pry off the existing ring with a flat-head screwdriver.

To see how, and for the rest of the process — check out How-To: Rebooting a Toyota Tacoma CV Axle.